The Boogey-Man

I was ten or eleven years old at the time. We lived out in the sticks, the boonies, the back water swamp area of Livingston County, Michigan. You might be familiar with the place. Howell, Byron, Cohoctah. Everything in Michigan is named after Indians. Wyandot and Gratiot? Indians. And just as the Native American Indians lived off the land, those who live way out in the country do the same, to a much lesser degree.

When I was a boy, there were no cell phones. I'm not talking 1930's and 40's. I'm talking 1980's, okay. We lived in a "MANSION" or so we were told, although now that I think about it, it was just a nice house. Two car agarage, three bedrooms, living room, family room, dining room, kitchen... It was nice.

My father made a number of upgrades to the house for security reasons. We were the only people on the block to have triple deadbolt locks, locking chains, locking plates and bars, a security system, a bulletproof door, bulletproof glass side window, bulletproof everything. Now, you might think, in the 1980's, that might have been a little bit of overkill, especially since we lived out in the country where nobody cared. Most people left their windows open and their doors unlocked... Yeah, not us.

My father was a blue collar business man. He made cranes and hoists. He owned a company he bought from Ford Motor Co. for a quarter million dollars, CASH. In today's standards, big f-ing deal. Back then, he was king. He used the company as a front to smuggle drugs for the columbian drug cartel. Hence, the added security measures. I was a kid. I had no idea.

My mother warned us against the dangers in life on a constant basis. CONSTANT. "Don't answer the door for anyone. If they don't have a key, they don't belong here." "If you see someone at the door and you don't know them, call your father, or call me, and I'll call your father." See, this is where it got weird because, my father was the last person I wanted to see, or call, when I needed safety and security. My father was abusive to the T. A real asshole. I hated him. I use the past tense because yes, he's dead. Thank God. No, thank the Devil. He finally brought that one home.

So, as any child living out in the sticks would do after school, we played. What we wanted to do was watch cartoons after school, but with only an hour of T.V. time, you had to pick and choose your poison. After He-Man and Transformers, it was out the door. "Go play outside and have fun," my mother would say. We'd leave, go to our friends house, and just in general, mess around and barely stay out of trouble on a daily basis. I guess my mother figured being out of the house might have been safer than being at the house, but I never knew, or thought of this, when I was a kid.

One day, after school, I'd come home and there were no vehicles in the driveway. It was strange because my mother was a stay-at-home mom and she rarely left if she knew we were on our way home. We were not the infamous "latch-key-kids" you heard about on the news, kids who were left to fend for themselves after school until nine or ten at night because their single mother worked 80 hours a week. No. That wasn't us. But, we did have a key...

Our wooden porch had JUST BARELY enough room on one side for my scrawny ass to shimmy through and then, I was trapped in a one foot high space that ran roughly six feet by six feet. In the very back corner was a small metal breath mints tin, buried under the dirt. Inside was a key for the back garage door. Once you got into the garage, you had to pull the twelve foot chest freezer away from the wall and fish out the key for the inner bulletproof door, and enter through the kitchen. Thankfully, I only had to do this once or twice.

So, here we were, safely inside the house, wondering what was going on, and why my mother wasn't at home. It was just my brother and I at the time. We followed protocol, not because we were scared for our safety... well, yeah, exactly because we were scared for our safety. If we didn't do things exactly as instructed, our ad would literally beat our asses bloody. If you've never been whipped with a two prong electrical extension cord, try it. Once you're done speaking with Jesus, and you come back into your body, you'll check that baby off your bucket list as a "do not repeat".

The phone rang. We had two phones in our house. One in the kitchen on the wall. One in my mom and dad's bedroom upstairs. I was... in their bedroom, raiding the giant green frog (Piggy Bank) and squirling away a good five bucks in quarters so I'd have money for ice creams at lunch for the next century. Hey, when the cat's away, the mice will play, right?

I picked up the phone and the voice on the other end said, "Hey! How's it going?"

"Okay," I answered. "Who's this?"

"I'm a friend of your mom and dad's," the man said, and red flags were already going off in my head. This was one of those phone calls my mother warned me about. I just knew it. Neddless to say, my mother had no friends. My father alienated her to everyone, even most of her family. My father had no friends. He fucked over ever friend he ever had. Eh, maybe this was a new friend of his... one he hadn't wronged yet.

Let me be clear about something. My father didn't fuck his friends over in the traditional sense. He didn't steal, he didn't con. He tricked nobody. What he did do was convince them to sample his product, get them hooked, keep them strung out and working 80 hours a week, while dangling the possibility of cutting them off over every infraction. He was a slave driver, drug dealer, asshole. But he wasn't a con-man. Not yet anyway.

"Well, is your mom and dad home?" The man asked me.

"What's your name?" I asked for the second time.

"I'm a friend of your mom and dad," the man answered without answering. "Are they home right now?"

It was at this point that I hung up the phone. The phone rang again, over and over, for many minutes, and then... it stopped.

I didn't think of it in terms I could understand back then. I was a kid. I didn't know. The phone stopped ringing. That meant something. It didn't mean they'd given up. It meant, they were on their way.

I told my brother we should hide. He said I was over-reacting. He wants to go down to George and Eric's house and play. I told him we couldn't. Not today. We had to stay home. I... I'm not exactly sure why I thought that. We probably would have been much safer almost a mile away at one of our friend's houses. Instead, we stayed.

My brother went into our room and got on the Atari 2600. I went into my dad's closet and pulled out the dark green suitcase. The dark green one was lightweight and on top. It was not a conscious decision to grab this one over any other, and there were about twelve of them. I just grabbed the one on top.

Double key locks. I went to my bedroom and grabbed a paperclip. I had the locks open in minutes. I slid the latches to the side, and pulled the suitcase open. Silver and darkness sat nestled in dark gray foam. Gold and red plastic bullets dotted the styrofoam. A box of shells was crushed into one corner. I slowly wriggled the silver hand gun out of it's place and stared at it, assessing the danger.

My father had "let" my brother and I, fire his hand guns from time to time. Forth of July, New Years, special occasions when my dad wanted to show off for family and co-workers, ex-friends and neighbors. For a ten year old, barely able to heft the weight of a .44 Magnum, shooting it was exhilerating, and no fun. I could barely pull the trigger and it felt like it broke my wrist when it kicked. I was well aware of what the working end of the gun was, and the danger it posed, even at ten.

I never pointed it at anyone, or anything. I looked at the back of the cylinders to make sure the shells were in it. They were. My dad kept his guns fully loaded. Not cocked, locked, or whatever, but they had rounds in them. I checked the safety. It was green. Red meant dead. That I knew.

I flipped the safety off, and back on. I had to make sure I could do it quickly. I gotta say, now, looking back at that... that was pretty fucking smart. I'd never had any formal training, just dear old dad showing me the ropes while he and my uncles laughed when the gun went off and almost broke my hand.

I took a handfull of extra bullets and put them in my pocket. The gun was a revolver. I didn't know how many I would need. I heard a noise outside and I went to my parent's bedroom window and looked out. A car had stopped in front of our neighbor's house. The hood was popped open. A man ran up to the house, a black belt in his hand. I heard screaming. I didn;t think the neighbors were home. Their vehicles weren't there...

The guy went back to the car, slammed the hood and then drove in front of our house. He stopped, got out of the passenger side. Sorry, there were two people. The driver was a woman. This time, as soon as the hood was up, the woman got out, grabbed the belt from the guy and walked up to our house.

The door-bell rang. I walked downstairs real-real quiet like. I went to the door and stood behind it, the safest place to be in the whole house, I supposed. The woman on the other side of the door continued knocking. "Are you in there?"

I turned the corner, gun in hand, barrel pointed toward the glass... the bulletproof glass. The safety was off. The gun was loaded. "Alex! Open the door just a little!" I said and I turned one of the deadbolt locks with my left hand as hard as I could. "CLICK-THUNK!"

The woman moved out of the way, out of my view, and then I saw her out in the yard, hoofing it across the front lawn, taking a huge out-of-the-way circular path back up to the road where she got back in the car. A few moments later, the man got out. I could see he had a gun in his hand. He walked up to the door, looked in through the glass... the glass was that semi-wavy shit so it was hard making out that the barrel of my gun was pressed against the glass, point blank... and then he saw it. He jerked his head back as if he'd been hit with a baseball, and ran.

Bulletproof or not, I guess he didn't know, and didn't want to take his chances. He got in the car and they BACKED down the road until they were out of sight. I assume he turned around when he got far enough away to make sure we didn't write down his plates but, he didn't need to. I wasn't going out to get his plate details.

A week later we came home to the front door completely smashed in. The bulletproof window was broken out. Blood coated the edges of broken glass. The door was crushed in the middle, bowed in completely. The garage door was smashed in...

After a quick inspection, my father deemed it safe to go inside. Whoever had tried, had tried and failed. The window wasn't big enough to permit a body to squeeze through. Apparently the multitude of locks was a good thing and whoever had broke the glass, couldn't reach the floor bolt or the bar at the far wall. We went in through the garage, as we always did, and assessed the damage.

Within a day there was a crew replacing the front door, the slim window, and the surrounding structure of the front of the house. Instead of wood with metal strapping and metal bar, this part was now steel I-beam with some wooden inserts to attach exterior vinyl and the front porch lights. The garage door was replaced with a reinforced one complete with quick locks and a cable that would spring up out of the seam between the concrete and the skirting, if the garage door was smashed in, effectively using a vehicles weight and momentum to lift the front end up and flip the vehicle inside the garage, if it ever happened.

We got new phones with the latest high-tech invention. Caller-ID.

I lived to tell the tale, and my brother denies ever having been part of it, or that any part of our experience was real. He was playing video games. He says I made it all up, but he still can't explain why someone would drive their car into our front door a week later. My mother is mute on the subject. She doesn't like remembering that old life. I don't blame her.

Am I lucky to be alive? Maybe. Lucky, and then some.

I've got a lot of stories to tell. Stories of mischief and mayhem, chaos and calamity. Ever fall through a frozen lake and almost die? Shoot yourself in the foot on accident? Almost start a forest fire? How about getting shot with an arrow? Go twenty feet across a paved road on your bare chest. Blow up half your home with some home made dynamite? Drug running? Kidnapping? Own a multi-million dollar coporation at the age of ten, and not even know it... that's my life. Let me know if you like what you read, and I'll do it some more.

One of my philosiphies; A story is meant to tell. Sure you can imagine the rest, but you don't give the reader ten percent and figure they'll imagine the rest. My stories have MEAT. I tell you what you need to know, how it is, how it was. You can fill in the rest, but your brain won't hurt at the end, unless you're laughing so hard, or crying out loud.